CARL KASELL: From NPR and WBEZ-Chicago, this is WAIT WAIT...DON'T TELL ME!, the NPR News quiz. I'm Carl Kasell, and here's your host, at the Fox Theater in Atlanta, Georgia, Peter Sagal.
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PETER SAGAL, HOST:
Thank you, Carl. Thank you everybody. Whoa, thank you. Southern hospitality. That is very kind of you. It's great, great to be here in Atlanta. We got a great show for you today. We got Dr. Thomas Frieden; he's the head of Atlanta's own Centers for Disease Control. He'll be coming by later to tell us why we should never ever go into very large theaters filled with people.
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SAGAL: He just sees you as disease vectors.
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SAGAL: But, first, I got to say, we are so excited to have the one and only Carl Kasell back here with us.
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SAGAL: We missed you, Carl. You've been gone. Carl, you've been gone for three weeks. What were you doing all that time?
KASELL: It was pretty uneventful, Peter. I helped out Clint Eastwood with an idea for a speech.
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KASELL: I gave Lindsay Lohan some driving lessons.
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KASELL: And I made a great video at a Mitt Romney fundraiser.
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SAGAL: Glad you kept busy.
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SAGAL: So, Carl is back, he's ready to go. If you are too, give us a call. The number is 1-888-Wait-Wait, that's 1-888-924-8924. Hi, you're on WAIT WAIT...DON'T TELL ME!
ROXANNE PARKER: Hi, I'm Roxanne, from Philadelphia.
SAGAL: Hey, Roxanne, from Philadelphia.
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SAGAL: How are you?
PARKER: I'm good.
SAGAL: Apparently, you have some fans here. Are you notorious for some reason?
PARKER: I've never been to Georgia, so I hope not.
SAGAL: Oh.
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SAGAL: Well, welcome to the show, Roxanne. Let me introduce you to our panel this week, here on stage at the beautiful Fox Theater. First up, a correspondent for "CBS Sunday Morning," whose documentary "Electoral Dysfunction" opens in theaters this weekend and airs on PBS next month. I'm talking about Mo Rocca; he's here.
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MO ROCCA: Hi, Roxanne.
PARKER: Hi, Mo.
SAGAL: Next up, a contributor to "CBS Sunday Morning" and to the new "Ricki Lake Show," it's Faith Salie, from Atlanta, Georgia.
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FAITH SALIE: Hi, Roxanne.
PARKER: Hi, Faith.
SAGAL: And an author and humorist whose latest book is "Alphabetter Juice," Decatur, Georgia's own, Roy Blount, Jr., is right back here.
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ROY BLOUNT JR: Hey, Roxanne.
PARKER: Hi.
SAGAL: You'll start us off, of course, with Who's Carl This Time. Carl Kasell, back, rested and ready from his time off, is going to recreate for you three quotations from the week's news. If you can correctly identify or explain just two of them, you will win our prize, of course, Carl's voice on your voicemail or whatever you're using to intercept messages. Ready to go?
PARKER: Definitely.
SAGAL: All right, here's your first quote.
KASELL: Well, it wasn't elegantly stated, let me put it that way.
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SAGAL: That was somebody admitting he didn't put it elegantly, when he said at a private fundraiser that 47 percent of Americans were bitter moochers.
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SAGAL: Who was it?
PARKER: That would have been Mitt Romney.
SAGAL: Yes, indeed, Mitt Romney, very well done.
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JR: It's hard to put your foot in your mouth elegantly, really.
SAGAL: It really is hard to do that. So, the Romney campaign has been in damage control mode, ever since the video of his remarks at a fundraiser came to light this week. As you heard, Romney admitted that he could have disparaged 47 percent of Americans more elegantly.
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SAGAL: How exactly would you do that? With a British accent?
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SAGAL: I say, a terrible pity about the riffraff.
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ROCCA: These private gatherings are always a problem. Four years ago, it was Barack Obama with the voters clinging to their guns and religion. Now, it's Romney with the 47 percent. We should just cancel all the debates and have a gigantic fundraiser where everyone's invited then we can hear what these guys think.
SAGAL: That's true.
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SAGAL: This is the later development. It was revealed that there's two minutes missing from the videotape. Did you hear this? Like the video is in two parts and there's two minutes missing in between them and a lot of Romney's defenders on the internet were like it's not complete.
So, somehow these two minutes will exonerate him. And the question is well how, how could these two minutes make it all seem better? Well, we found - we couldn't find the video but we did get a transcript of what he said in those two minutes that exonerates him. Here's Carl with a reenactment.
KASELL: And now, I will continue with my impression of a jackass.
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SALIE: I can't keep up with the percentages either. OK, so I pay taxes, so I don't know if I'm in the 53 percent, but I'm not part of the 1 percent.
SAGAL: No, no.
SALIE: I'm the 52 percent I guess. I just...
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SAGAL: You know.
SALIE: I don't know.
SAGAL: If I knew that this whole politics thing was going to involve math, I wouldn't have gotten into it, you know?
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SALIE: What I count on is the 13 percent of Romney's hair that is white. I love that. Don't you love that? Just the little - it's so handsome.
SAGAL: Now, what's interesting is one of the criticisms of Romney is that all during his campaign for president, which I think has lasted seven years, we've never seen the authentic Romney. Now they always say he's not authentic, he's too stiff, he's not real. Now we've seen the authentic Romney. What do you think?
SALIE: He did a...
JR: He's more than 13 percent white, I'd say that.
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SAGAL: Roxanne, here's your next quote.
KASELL: She's great but she shouldn't be sunbathing in the nude, only herself to blame.
SAGAL: That was Donald Trump, who himself should never be doing anything nude.
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SAGAL: Talking about whom?
PARKER: Kate Middleton.
SAGAL: Exactly right, Kate Middleton.
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SAGAL: Also known now as the Duchess of Cambridge; known in the future as the Duchess of Hotness.
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SAGAL: She was photographed sunbathing topless at a villa in the south of France. The British government is not taking this lying down. They've filed suit against the magazines that published the pictures. They've convinced eBay not to sell the existing issues. This is the biggest victory the British have won in decades.
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SAGAL: Really, they've come back. You can imagine Braveheart rallying the troops, "Aye, they can take our empire, but they can never take pictures of our breasts."
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ROCCA: Those royals love to get naked.
SAGAL: Do they? Oh yeah, well we had the Prince Harry thing.
ROCCA: Because Harry was naked. I won't be satisfied until we get to see Fergie's daughters wearing nothing but those wedding hats.
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SAGAL: By the way, this is true, both the magazines that published the photos in Italy and in France happen to be owned by none other than Silvio Berlusconi.
ROCCA: Right.
SAGAL: That's true. Mr. Berlusconi has promised a personal investigation. He says he's going to determine how accurate those topless photos are.
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ROCCA: Please, we do not want to see him topless.
SALIE: She's too old for Berlusconi.
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JR: Not enough of her either.
SAGAL: Yeah. Even more embarrassing for the Duchess, of course, is the surreptitious video taken in which her boobs are caught disparaging 47 percent of the British people.
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SAGAL: Your last quote, Roxanne, is from a big football fan, talking to one of his favorite players last Sunday.
KASELL: Come on, I need you for my fantasy team.
SAGAL: His expression of enthusiasm wouldn't have been a problem except for the fact that the fan was also what?
PARKER: Oh, I don't know this one. A football player?
SAGAL: Not another player, but he was on the field.
PARKER: Oh, I don't know. A referee?
SAGAL: Yes, a referee.
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SAGAL: He was one of the replacement refs. The real NFL referees are being locked out by the owners. The only people they could get to take their place are guys whose entire referee experience is watching their friends play Madden Football on Xbox and yelling "Oh man, that can't be right."
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SAGAL: These refs have missed plays; they've blown calls. One of them was pulled - this is true - at the last minute, right before the New Orleans Saints game he was supposed to referee, because he posted pictures of himself in New Orleans Saints gear on Facebook. He was a big fan.
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SAGAL: Worst of all was when the whole referring squad during the game ripped their shirts off and it spelled "Go Saints" across their naked chests.
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SAGAL: This is the thing about this strike, I mean, you know, most strikes just makes you angry at the people striking. But it's not a strike, it's a lockout, of course. But this will make people absolutely grateful for the refs, because the replacements are so bad.
We're never going to take them for granted again. They're going to come back and fans will be yelling, "Hey, you need glasses to protect your eyes from the harmful UV rays of the sun."
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JR: Pretty soon, a referee is going to intercept a pass.
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SAGAL: Carl, how did Roxanne do?
KASELL: Roxanne, you had three correct answers, so I'll be doing the message on your voicemail or home answering machine.
SAGAL: Well done.
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(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.